test drive meme: january 2020

[modblob]

Redshift: Welcome to the v͖͕̺̲̘̱̜͎o̴̦̣̠̦̘̹͞i̯̖d̛̪̬͈̱̦̝͍̕.

▶ Click here to read what characters will experience when arriving in Anchor.

▶ All TDM threads can be considered game canon, and current players are welcome to either top-level on the TDM so prospective players can tag them, or use the prompts for logs or network posts on the communities. All threads on the TDM can be used for Activity Check.

a. nuclear fallout boy.

There is a mid-90s strip mall forming outside of Anchor.

Which is to say that there is now a Hot Topic next to the Blockbuster, and a little canopied sidewalk connecting the two. The difference between them is that the Hot Topic has an airlock entry and is safe from the radiation outside.

It's also not decked out for any Earth holidays, but it is fully stocked. Just not stocked with things that an Earth-based shopper would recognize as their "typical" fare. There are band t-shirts, with extreme fonts and symbols, but said fonts are almost cuneiform and the symbols are references that no one who wasn't living on Mars-15 in 1994 will get. The joke t-shirts are much the same, with cartoon characters, visual puns, memes, and designs that are, well, out of this world. There are bizarre earrings in standing cases, body decorations that might not quite fit a human, temporary tattoos, and random junk that cool fifteen-year-olds would snap up if it existed on Mars. (Use your imaginations, Anchorites.)

One thing you won't find in this store is advanced technology that serves any actual purpose. Sure, there are thumb-sized fart machines and little wall-mounted projectors that can decorate ceilings with preprogrammed holographic scenery (mostly starscapes). But none of it is any more useful than the keychain of that fat hipster cat with butterfly wings and bug eyes hanging from one of the displays. The cash register, which is the most futuristic thing in the place, is smashed to bits. Gotta get those Mars credits somewhere else.

b. looking kinda familiar.

There are little creatures scuttling through Anchor again, though these ones... well, they really are creatures more than they can be called animals. They're little blue-gray blobs of tissue, growing as they roll around until they finally split in two, both pieces then going their own way. Even though they don't have legs, the little blobs are fast, and many of them have no interest in interacting with the people of Anchor, and disappear into the ether never to be seen again.

Some of them, however, will single people out and start following them. The longer that little blob follows, the closer it gets, the more it takes the shape of an animal that represents the follow-ee's innermost soul or personality. The part of themselves that they hide away. As it begins to take shape, the person it follows will start to hear a tiny voice, at first just muffled sounds that could be coming from anywhere, but as the creature's form clarifies, the mumbling turns into actual speech. Clumsy, at first, almost like babytalk, but soon the little creature following its chosen Anchorite will be able to speak with its chosen person in full sentences. No one else can hear the little creature talk - only the one it decided to follow.

Keep the little bugger (or big bugger, if your innermost soul is an elephant or something) around for a week, and it will settle into its chosen shape, bonding to you for as long as you're alive. It can speak, listen, and understand, but you're the only one who can hear its voice. If this whole animal companion stalker situation isn't up your alley, though, and you're not feeling the connection, the little critter will slouch off to its own blobby existence.

c. creatures from the black locked room.

There's been a lot of exploration happening in that flooded area that Joe warned you all about. A lot of rooms opened, a lot of rooms explored and/or destroyed (thanks, Jacob et al. srsly). It's a lot of noise in a somewhat confined space. And something in one of the rooms is stirring...and done with being locked away.

Midday on the 20th of the month, the sounds of metal shrieking as it is twisted out of shape burble up out of the flooded halls. Thumping, rumbling, and eerie hooting noises are all muffled by the water at first.

There's only one at first, sloshing up out of the water and looking perfectly dry. Well... it looks like nothing, actually. A deep blackness that can hypnotize if it's stared at for too long. Long, dark claws that shine with a silvery edge. The vicious teeth in its shapeless head glow a pale blue-green.

Then another comes to the top of the stairs, and another.

They're perplexed at first by the webbing Peter Parker left to block off the hall, but a few experimental pokes with a claw shows that the stuff gives under their talons with only a little bit of effort. The three creatures slice their way free and move as a pack through the lower levels of Anchor, prepared to mob whoever they come across and tear them to shreds.

There's a problem when it comes to straight-up fighting these things, though: when physically attacked, they simply bounce back, when pieces are hacked off with a blade, each piece becomes a new, identical monster. The only way to beat them is with energy and other alternate fighting styles - magic, lasers, energy projectiles, etc.

Some people might be lucky enough not to run into them. Good luck to the rest.

d. the network.

Need to get hold of someone, call for help, ask the city at large a question? Need to ask a friend to back you up to take out the toothy voids? Maybe you need to hold your sat phone up to whatever crazy thing you're seeing and send out a recording to double-check if your eyes are deceiving you and what you're looking at is real?

Whatever the reason, the network is going strong, so feel free to include a post to it in your top-levels.

Navigation.

Comments

[mustact]

There's someone else here. Someone else who also seems surprised, but ... not about the same thing. Ratonhnhaké:ton studies Rey quietly for a moment, gaze sweeping across her and lingering briefly on the lizard, before his gaze fastens on the wall beside her.

"You did not hear it?"

[circumitus]

Is she missing something here? Rey just regards him with a look and a raised brow.

"Heard the clippity-clop of the clumsy hooves of a grown ass deer, if that's what you mean."

Judging from his expression, however, that's definitely not what he means.

[mustact]

"No." He shakes his head, bewildered. "It spoke."

Perhaps that makes him sound mad, but the whole situation is rather mad, so he'd like to think this woman is willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. If she's new to things like these, though, she might not.

[circumitus]

Any other time, Rey would undoubtedly think this guy is crazy. However, the horned lizard that had since been stalking her around the place had started developing some vague speech patterns much unlike anyone else here.

"Dumbass," mutters a voice below, and Rey looks down to find the lizard crawling up the back of her tanktop and onto her shoulder.

She looks back to the man, tight-lipped and uncomfortable. "Didn't hear it." Her head cants to the disgruntled reptile now perching on her. "Take it you didn't hear that, either."

Or at least, she hopes not, because wow that was rude.

[mustact]

"No."

Hm. That's interesting.

He looks over at the stag, and then to the lizard on Rey's shoulder. What is this creature? If it can change shape like this, and speak to only one specific person. Has someone created it? Or did it come into being like most others?

"You're mine," the stag says, staring at him with big eyes, like that will explain everything.

"I'm yours?"

"Yes."

[circumitus]

Rey's had similar questions herself, though at this point she's gotten used to not getting any answers from anyone. The lizard croaks words every now and then, often monosyllables and nothing complex.

She blinks at his response to the stag, able to parse what she can from the one side of that exchange, until the lizard speaks: "Mine, mine, mine."

"Well, that's weirdly possessive of you," Rey mutters flatly.

[mustact]

"I suppose they are ... bonded to us."

If they can only be heard by the person they seem to have chosen, and if they say that, then there must be some form of connection. A strong one. It's simultaneously familiar and entirely new to him, which is his experience with a lot of things ever since he found himself in the City.

Life is truly strange and fascinating, to use kinder words.

[circumitus]

At the implications of what he's saying, Rey gives the lizard on her a flat look.

"Bonded? Oh hell no." She huffs, scratching her forehead in frustration. "Already got a fucked up cat 'bonded' to me. Don't need some weird ass talking reptile around."

"Not... forever."

She lowers her hand from her face, blinking. "What?"

[mustact]

He tilts his head, waiting for a moment to see if Rey continues, before he asks:

"What is it saying?"

[circumitus]

Rey pauses as she listens to it. She holds up a hand as she takes the time to actually hear what it has to say before responding to the question.

"That it can leave if it wants to... or if we want it to. It's not permanent if it's up to us--" She falls quiet again, tilting her head at the lizard talking in her ear. "So wait, you'll fuck off so long as you're told to?"

"That is... yes. Yes."

Ah, so that's how it is.

[mustact]

For a few moments, he watches Rey and her lizard friend curiously, but eventually turns his head back towards the stag. It looks right back at him, its dark eyes almost seeming to see right through him. They're nearly the shade of Angel's eyes, but there's more brown in them.

"How do you choose? Why me?"

He's not sure if the stag understand or if it's trying to think, but it doesn't answer for several seconds. Perhaps it simply can't find the words. There aren't always words to explain something.

It does speak eventually.

"I ... saw something."

[circumitus]

Rey senses the pause between him and his deer that she's remiss to comment on it at first. Even though she can't hear the words, it does look like there's an exchange of some kind between the two, much like herself and the blob-turned-reptile.

"Did it say something enlightening or is it just as vague as anything else that comes from this shitty place?" Rey asks flatly.

"Rude," the horned lizard croaks, before climbing down her shoulder to hide in her pocket.

She huffs. "Well, you are."

[mustact]

He shrugs.

"I think they may not know themselves why they are here or how they choose the person, or they do not know how to express it yet. They may have been created by someone. I'm not sure it matters."

Since they seem friendly, there's no need to be worried about them, and beyond that ... From the room he and the others found them in, he's quite certain they were some kind of experiment.

[circumitus]

In Rey's experience, the friendlier something seems the more suspicious it becomes, though that might be her own paranoia at work there. It wouldn't be the first time it's gotten the better of her...

"Right, what matters is where they came from, how, and why. Were they engineered to become companions to the people here before, or something else."

From inside her pocket, the lizard croaks a few more indecipherable words. Is it even trying anymore?

[mustact]

Definitely her own paranoia. Not that Ratonhnhaké:ton hasn't been burnt by friendly people before. However, these creatures are not people. They may have been created by humans, but he's inclined to trust them anyway.

"My friends and I found them, but no clues as to why they were created. It also appears to have multiplied, and grown."

[circumitus]

Rey gapes at him, nonplussed.

"You mean you guys found where they came from?" Since her blob just showed up, and she'd speculated whether they came from somewhere in this place or the same way everyone else did.

If that might mean there's data to be found anywhere, it's worth looking into. It has to be.

[mustact]

He shrugs.

"We found where I assume someone stored them."

If that's where they came from? He doesn't know. Maybe they arrived one day as mysteriously as the ship that crashed outside the colony, and the stores that seemed to appear out of thin air for no reason. Not unlike how everyone currently living here and who lived here in the past appeared, he supposes.

[circumitus]

Things just keep getting more curious.

"Have to wonder what the hell the people from before were even doing here for things to get like this. If even they knew."

Considering they all are either vanished or dead, she's going to assume the latter part is true.

[mustact]

"I wonder if it 'got' like this, or if it was intended."

Does he truly believe so? No. That doesn't mean he won't consider the possibility. People are more willing to hurt each other than he wants to think, but it's difficult after seeing it for himself as often as he has.

[circumitus]

The idea is enough for Rey to snort.

"Right. Maybe they hoped the blobs would turn into something more fierce like lions and destroy their enemies."

Instead Rey got a very ridiculous, thorny, tiny lizard that shoots blood out of its eye. Someone might have use for that.

[mustact]

He's not completely sure if Rey is joking or if she's completely serious - maybe a combination of both - but either way, he doesn't think that sounds like an impossibility. A creature that can turn into anything it wants? It's something else.

"Maybe. It was well protected, seeing as it survived whatever wiped out the people here. But we can only speculate."

Since there was no information about it.

He shakes his head, and idly lifts a hand to run it over the stag's neck.

"What's your name?" he asks, turning his gaze back to Rey. "I am Connor."

[circumitus]

Protected... Now that he mentions it, do they need to eat? Or be taken care of at all, like normal animals? If they were able to survive just fine as blobs, it doesn't seem like it would be entirely necessary.

Whatever the case might be, it's something Rey can consider asking her new lizard friend later. Fortunately, it can talk, even with its limited vocabulary and all.

Her eyes dart towards the man introducing himself, before she remembers that part that tends to come with casual meetings...

"Ah, right. Name's Rey. Been around for a few months now."

[mustact]

A nod.

"It is a pleasure, Rey. How do you find Anchor?"

To him, it seems at once safer and more dangerous than the City. The lack of people makes him feel uneasy, but the City was a dangerous place without thinking about the reasons that they were there in the first place and how to get the people who wanted to go home, home. Here, it seems ... simpler. Survival is a more pressing problem.

[circumitus]

"It's very... lonely," she admits, though remiss to do so. "Don't really like the lack of people here, or not knowing where they went."

In the sky prison, Rey at least knew where there were dangers on the other side of the walls she had spent weeks hiding in. She knew what to expect around most corners and could kill time by listening in on voices through pipes and other forms of eavesdropping.

Here? Not so much. If not for the promising supply of food and drink and the occasional company that doesn't try to kill her, she would almost be nostalgic for the times she spent crawling and fighting just to survive.

[mustact]

He makes a quiet noise of agreement. It is a little lonely. Most of the time he's not surrounded by a large amount of people either, but the homestead is much smaller than Anchor, and the question of what happened to those who inhabited Anchor before only makes the lack of people all the more eerie.

"Did you see what Brain found? There appears to have been a battle."

If that's the reason everyone is gone is still unclear, however.